Visual Disobedience: Art and Decoloniality in Central America

by Kency Cornejo

In Visual Disobedience, Kency Cornejo traces the emergence of new artistic strategies for Indigenous, feminist, and anticarceral resistance in the wake of torture, disappearance, killings, and US-funded civil wars in Central America. Cornejo reveals a direct line from US intervention to current forms of racial, economic, and gender injustice in the isthmus, connecting this to the criminalization and incarceration of migrants at the US-Mexico border today. Drawing on interviews with Central American artists and curators, she theorizes a form of “visual disobedience” in which art operates in opposition to nation-states, colonialism, and visual coloniality. She counters historical erasure by examining over eighty artworks and highlighting forty artists across the region. Cornejo also rejects the normalized image of the suffering Central American individual by repositioning artists as creative agents of their own realities. With this a comprehensive exploration of contemporary Central American art, Cornejo highlights the role of visual disobedience as a strategy of decolonial aesthetics to expose and combat coloniality, heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, empire, and other systems of oppression.

Genres: Art

304 pages, Hardcover

Published October 18, 2024

Reviews

[Miguel Fernandez · Rating 5 out of 5]

The conclusion really ties this book together in a compelling way.

[Pablo Enrique · Rating 1 out of 5]

While I concede its utility as an objective archive of regional performance art, this text ultimately suffocates any genuine pursuit of truth or aesthetic beauty beneath a dogmatic, unfalsifiable framework of performative identity politics and the celebration of “reclaimed” slurs.